The small ad pages of local newspapers often reveal more than the news pages. They give the reader a glimpse behind the conventional social scene into a slightly sad world of used cars, secondhand furniture, hopeful handymen, lost cats and lonely hearts. This is where you find the real, down to earth life of a place, so I never fail to read the back pages of our local papers wherever we are.
What surprised me this year in France – because France is supposed to be, at least in theory, the natural home of secularism and rationalism - was the number of announcements offering clairvoyant services of one kind or another: Palm reading, Tarot Cards, and even crystal-gazing updated with a computer.
These clairvoyants are not modest: they promise contact with lost loved ones; luck in gambling and in romance; protection against enemies and accidents; revelations of infidelity past or future; and health predictions. With so much advance information available it scarcely seems worth worrying about the future at all – it’s all pre-arranged, it is already what it is, and we may as well simply get on with it. Just confirm the details with your local psychic, and pay the bill if you like what you hear.
Once I became aware of this flourishing oracular industry I began to notice signs of it everywhere: tiny shops selling New Age paraphernalia right out if the sixties: beads and crystals, incense sticks, Ouija boards, flimsy vaguely eastern cotton garments, sandals made out of lumps of wood, and discreet signs offering "readings," which I assume are not of the literary kind. You can have your future foretold by astrology, or by planchette, and you can have your aura read (and even photographed), and your Karma inspected and approved by an expert.
I observed a similar phenomenon on my last visit to the Hamptons, although America, the land of sturdy common sense, should surely be immune to such foolishness. The baby boomers, who started it all, may be collecting their pensions, but there is a persistent nostalgia for notions like clairvoyance, reincarnation, mysterious earth forces, magic crystals, astrology, and every kind of superstitious twaddle left over from the Dark Ages, which weren't called the Dark Ages for nothing.
The secret of business success is said to be: find a need and fill it. There’s certainly a need here, and we all know what it is: reassurance. We would all like to peek into the future, and get some clues about our destiny, or our fate. Unfortunately, we can’t visit the future because it is not yet there to be visited. You don’t have to be a much of a philosopher to know that – Einstein and H.G.Wells notwithstanding – the laws of nature guarantee that anything you may told about the future is fake news, although it might also be a clever guess.
I was tempted, just for a moment, to have my own future foretold. But at my age it would be a waste of money. And do I really want to know? It’s the plot of a thousand science fiction novels. If we knew the future we would want to change it. But then it wouln’t BE the future, so what was it we thought we knew about the future when we thought we knew it? I predict, quite soon, that I will feel a headache coming on.
Copyright: David Bouchier
